Good morning. I’m delighted to announce a bumper crop of additional speakers for our fast-approaching Fortune Brainstorm AI gathering.
Joining us this year are more leaders from the hottest names in AI, including OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, Nvidia enterprise AI chief Justin Boitano, Cursor CEO Michael Truell, Qualcomm auto-industrial chief Nakul Duggal, and Zoox cofounder Jesse Levinson.
We’ll also hear from pioneers in the category, including Caltech’s Anima Anandkumar, Insitro CEO Daphne Koller, and Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun. Leading investors will be there too, including Cathy Gao of Sapphire Ventures and Steve Jang of Kindred Ventures.
We’ll hear from Daydream CEO Julie Bornstein, Gap CTO Sven Gerjets, and Perplexity business chief Dmitry Shevelenko about the use of agentic AI in retail. We’ll learn from Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty and Shield AI cofounder Ryan Tseng about how autonomy is changing the business of defense.
And we’re delighted to welcome Chima’s Kiara Nirghin, OpenMatter’s Iddris Sandu, and Lore’s Zehra Naqvi to discuss how the next generation of founders is thinking about applied intelligence.
One more thing: We’re delighted to host some Hollywood sizzle in the form of actor-filmmaker-entrepreneur Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Asteria Film Co. cofounder Natasha Lyonne. It will be…absolute cinema.
These speakers join previously announced eminences from Amazon, Calm, Contextual AI, CoreWeave, Databricks, DataSnipper, Exelon, Glean, Google, Intuit, Rivian, and Serve Robotics.
Brainstorm AI is Dec. 8 to 9 in San Francisco. Register your interest to attend before it’s too late. —Andrew Nusca
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When will Apple name a new CEO?
Another day, another report suggesting that Apple CEO Tim Cook is headed toward the exits.
This time it’s the Financial Times who says that the iPhone-maker is “stepping up its succession planning efforts” in anticipation of Cook, 65, stepping down “as soon as next year.”
The candidate on everyone’s lips remains hardware engineering SVP John Ternus, according to the report, but “no final decisions have been made.”
At any rate, there’s little chance Apple would name Cook’s successor before the all-important holiday season is in the books.
It wouldn’t wait too long, though. “An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September,” the FT notes.
Cook, of course, has been in place since he took the reins from an ailing Steve Jobs in 2011. At the time, Apple was a $350 billion company; today it’s worth $4 trillion—though it has lagged its biggest tech peers in riding the AI boom. —AN
The future is lunar and orbital AI data centers
Silicon Valley’s leaders just can’t quit space.
As an AI boom threatens—promises?—to consume all conventional industry, some of the world’s wealthiest men are wondering if it would be better to extend the infrastructure buildout beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
A Wall Street Journal column notes that Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk (natch), Amazon and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos (ditto), and Google’s Sundar Pichai have separately discussed lunar or orbital AI data centers that would be powered by the sun and free of terrestrial regulations.
“We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades,” Bezos said last month at a conference.
“I think we’ll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where…most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute,” Musk said two months ago at a conference.
“Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” Pichai said earlier this month of the company’s Project Suncatcher, which “is exploring how we could one day build scalable ML compute systems in space, harnessing more of the sun’s power.”
How far off are we? According to the Journal, “the current economics of space-based data centers don’t make sense” but could “as soon as a decade or so from now.”
To infinity and beyond? —AN
South Korean firms go big by going home
More promises and hopefully, more profits.
On Sunday, Samsung and other major South Korean companies said they would deepen their investment in domestic industry.
Samsung pledged to invest 450 trillion won, or $310 billion, over the next five years to build another production line at its Pyeongtaek manufacturing hub (to meet global AI chip needs) and AI data centers in the city of Gumi and the country’s southwest South Jeolla Province (to help the rest of the country keep up with the capital, Seoul).
Other companies making new commitments include chipmaker SK Group (at least 128 trillion won, or $88.3 billion, through 2028 with a focus on AI) and the shipbuilding arms of conglomerates Hanwha and Hyundai.
The announcements come in the wake of a fresh trade deal with the U.S. that left some concerned that homegrown corporate giants will prioritize the States over Korea. The government in Seoul pledged to invest $350 billion in U.S. industries to dodge the worst of the Trump administration’s tariffs. —AN
More tech
—Anthropic faces industry skepticism. Some researchers aren’t convinced by its report that a recent cyberattack was 90% automated by AI.
—Default rates on BNPL use rise. One quarter of the 91.5 million people in the U.S. who use “buy now, pay later” schemes do so for groceries.
—Google DeepMind’s strategic focus. AI chief Demis Hassabis reportedly prioritized the Nobel Prize over industry competition or commercialization.
—The state of U.S. tech IPOs. Driven by AI and crypto, 51 firms raised $16.8 billion this year, a healthy sum but nowhere near 2021’s 127 IPOs raising $74.4 billion.
—Datacenter buildout blowback has begun. Locals blocked or delayed 17 U.S. data center projects worth $98 billion between April and June of this year.
—Apple to pay Masimo $634 million. Jury says Apple infringed on the company’s blood-oxygen patent in its Watch.
—Meta to assess employees’ AI impact. A “core expectation” for 2026 performance.
